Southern Polytechnic State University - School of Architecture

Reaffirming its mission to both inspire and train new generations of architects, Southern Polytechnic State University built a new facility to house its School of Architecture. The 80,000 SF, four-story building designed by Heery International is a dynamic learning facility, providing classrooms, faculty offices, studios, jury/presentation space, gallery, rooftop project area accessible for photography and model studies, a building systems lab and a community design assistance center with a design planning studio, project display area and resource library. The innovative design won a Georgia AIA Design Award of Excellence and the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s Award for Deal of the Year – Design.

To meet the challenge of exciting and educating students at the same time, Heery exposed the anatomy of the building. Mechanical and structural connections are visible through perforated walls and fragmented ceilings, revealing the complexity of what is normally hidden, including duct work, fan coil units and building structure. The concrete frame is exposed throughout the building, with the four bracing shear walls deliberately sandblasted to render them clearly visible to students. In similar fashion, architectural elements are creatively illustrated both inside and outside the building. A forced-perspective corridor leading from classrooms to faculty offices uses the visual effect for functional purpose, beginning at a normal width at the main office/jury space, and widening to the west to encourage faculty/student congregation and provide display areas for student projects. The building itself is positioned at a key point on the southern tip of campus, specifically to absorb and resolve two geometric grid systems of the campus, the parallel grid of buildings on the west side and a rotating grid on the east side. Centered between these two grids, the new building aligns and embraces both, unifying and strengthening the entire southern end of campus.